# 3 .23 - Becoming a ‘Spacifier’ – Why the European Union Needs

Since the Paris Agreement the “command of the commons” as a strategic goal (Posen has defined a collective mitigation objective, the EU has 2003) and have thus typically acted in pragmatically strategic turned to incentivising others to comply with that target and almost exclusively interest-based ways across the Global by combining the promotion of this aim with more asser- Spaces (see Gstöhl and. [...] ing norms, which are at the heart of the EU’s integration pro- ject but may not be shared by others, seems as unsuited to The need for a bespoke EU Global Spaces strategy the challenging contexts of Global Spaces as the belief that material capacity-building to mimic Great Power behaviour The EU’s general approach to the five Global Spaces has been would make the EU an adequately strategic actor. [...] egy that takes account of the uniqueness of both the Global Spaces and the European Union as a global actor is direly Both the significance of protecting the fragile Global Spaces needed. [...] The EU should thus adopt a Global Spaces strategy and the inadequacy of the EU’s current approach to them not only because of the growing significance of these Spaces, plead in favour of taking the strategic reflection on its contri- but also to clarify its own foreign policy ambitions vis-à-vis bution to Global Spaces governance to the next level. [...] A similar logic extends to outer ment to its key values – most prominently the pursuit of space, where the EU sees “the proliferation of space debris peace, precaution and the rule of law –, plays to its strengths [as] the most serious risk to the sustainability of space activi- as a multilateralist, and allows for greater flexibility of its dip- ties”, which it has pledged to “address” (European.